LFF 2014: The Standouts

Mommy (Xavier Dolan)

Xavier Dolan's fifth feature, Mommy, could be viewed as a companion piece to his debut I Killed My Mother, with a comparison between the two films highlighting how his filmmaking has advanced in the intervening five years. He remains a stylistically bold director – shooting Mommy in a 1:1 aspect ratio and filling the tight frame beautifully – but what's most impressive about his latest work is the confidence with which he chases euphoric highs and shattering lows.

Mommy is an unabashed melodrama that's constantly swinging for the fences, and the emotional force of the picture is irresistible, with Dolan nailing a series of bold and emotionally wrenching sequences and even finding unexpected textures in a number of familiar pop songs. He also draws extraordinary work from his actors, with Antoine-Olivier Pilon being a lively and unpredictable presence as a volatile teen and Suzanne Clément providing touching support as a mousy neighbour, while Anne Dorval's performance as embattled single mother Diane (Pilon plays her son) is simultaneously hilarious and devastating, and is as brilliant a piece of acting as you'll see anywhere this year. [PC]

THE TRIBE (MYROSLAV SLABOSHPYTSKIY)

Winner of the LFF's Best First Feature award, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s devastating ensemble piece is told entirely in Ukrainian sign language, with no dialogue and no subtitles. Rather than being intimidating or impenetrable, The Tribe clues viewers in on how to watch it almost immediately, relying on context, body language and incident.

Taking place in a school for the deaf and beginning with the point of view of new kid Sergey (Grigory Fesenko), what one might think is going to be a tender story of teenage adjustment soon becomes a chronicle of a vicious underground gang and the passions and loyalties within. Unfolding as a series of ever graver surprise turns rendered in haunting long takes, The Tribe recalls such classic school kid shockers as Lord of the Flies and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Slaboshpytskiy has made a film with a unique hook but one that doesn’t rely on gimmickry – underneath its method is a substantive emotional compendium that’s passionately, hypnotically shattering. [IM]

PHOENIX (CHRISTIAN PETZOLD)

Phoenix opens like a horror movie. A disfigured woman, her face swaddled in bloody bandages, is crossing the German border following the fall of the Third Reich. But director Christian Petzold’s touchstone isn’t Eyes Without a Face – it’s Vertigo. She’s Nelly (Nina Hoss), a holocaust survivor en route to Berlin where she hopes to have her mutilated face reconstructed. The operation isn’t a success; so much so that when she seeks out her husband, who may or may not have given her up to the Gestapo, he doesn’t recognise her. Instead he enlists her into a ruse to pose as his wife, who he presumes perished in the camps, so he can claim on her inheritance.

It’s a hokey twist, worthy of a Preston Sturges movie, but here it takes on heartbreaking proportions. We buy the premise because of the film’s dreamy quality: Phoenix’s Berlin is a rubble-strewn labyrinth and its inhabitants walking ghosts haunted by the recent past. Much of the film’s power emanates from Hoss, who’s mesmerising as a woman pretending to be someone else in front of her husband, who in turn coaches her on how to look and behave like her true self. The allegorical implications are clear: Nelly is her nation, scarred and changed forever, but trying to find itself again. [JD]

NATIONAL GALLERY (FREDERICK WISEMAN)

Frederick Wiseman spent months editing the reams of footage he shot on location, but what's remarkable about the finished product is how effortless it feels. National Gallery is one of the director's most fluid and elegant works, securing our attention quickly and keeping us engrossed on its journey behind the scenes of the iconic London landmark. We see people painstakingly restoring and cleaning art, we sit in on budget meetings (Wiseman's knack for making such scenes fascinating is uncanny), we hear lectures contextualising and illuminating various artworks, and often we simply watch members of the public as they stroll around the building and gaze upon masterpieces.

National Gallery is a celebration of art and of anyone who loves it, shares it and protects it, and one can't help feeling inspired by being in such company. The film is made with Wiseman's customary perceptiveness and unfussy grace, but in its final moments it achieves a sense of transcendence that lifts it into the top tier of this great documentarian’s work. [PC]

Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Hansen-Løve is a master of party scenes – the standout moments from her two previous features (Goodbye First Love and The Father of My Children) involve characters lost in a celebratory throng. Eden is one long party following Paul (Félix De Givry), a lanky and likeable DJ, as he floats through two decades on the fringes of the French house music scene. Success is always in sight but remains out of reach. What sustains him in the milieu is a palpable love for the music and a close-to-functioning coke addiction.

Written by Hansen-Løve with her DJ brother, Eden’s great strength is its lived-in authenticity. It’s a kind of vampire movie, with our protagonist trapped in the crepuscular purgatory of his early 20s. His friends swap clubbing for kids and early nights; Paul stagnates. The outlook isn’t wholly pessimistic, though. When the soundtrack is pounding it’s easy to see why he got lost in the music. At one point Paul describes the tracks he spins as halfway between melancholy and euphoria. Hanson-Love plays a similar tune. [JD]

IT FOLLOWS (DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL)

As horror premises go, this one is delicious – a sexually-transmitted curse that causes a monster to follow its victims to their death, assuming any form, visible only to the victim, and coming for them day or night. The teenage cast gives subtle, sympathetic performances, grounding this wild terror in reality, while the cinematography and assaultive score openly recall the cinemascope suburbia and savage synths of John Carpenter’s Halloween while building on the influence and deepening it.

David Robert Mitchell’s script and direction ponder the inevitability of mortality and work with themes of youth and sexuality, allusions to class and collective national guilt, and codified references to disparate works of literature, cinema and TV, making It Follows ripe for academic dissection. But more directly, the film just plain delivers as a bold, terrifying attack of cinema, immersive on the levels of imagery both beautiful and grotesque, and scares from the shallowest to the most pervasive. The term “instant classic” is being bandied around a lot on this one – deservedly. [IM]  

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From the Archive:

 • Agro-culture: Xavier Dolan on Tom at the Farm

• Movie Løve: Director Mia Hansen-Løve in interview

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